Formation of an air pollution index

Abstract

An air pollution index is a quantitative tool through which air pollution data can be reported uniformly. There have been efforts to describe overall air pollution by an aggregation of pollutant subindices. When ambiguous, these aggregations raise unnecessary alarm by declaring a less polluted air to be highly polluted. Similarly, when eclipsed, a false sense of security is provided by indicating highly polluted air as less polluted. Linear sum and root sum square forms in vogue suffer from ambiguity. Whereas the maximum operator aggregation does not consider change in the remaining pollutants, it is not a good tool for management purposes. In this paper, an ambiguity-and eclipsicity-free function has been presented for aggregation of air pollution subindices. For computer adaptation of the aggregation process, the subindices have been expressed as full range functions of the pollutant concentrations. © 1999 Air and Waste Management Association.